Conversations with a Monster
by Summer Laura
Summary: When your whole world consists of a chair in a dank B&B then all you really have is your past. And your family. Conversations with Hal during Detox.


Title – Words with a Monster

Rating – R for a bit of language

Disclaimer – Not mine, none of it's mine, only the dialogue is

Pairing – None. Hal/Alex friendship of sorts with Hal/Alex/Tom in the future.

Summary – Conversations through Detox. The repetitive motions and ministrations of a captive vampire and his ghostly companion!

(Part 1 of 3)

(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)

"I had a shield. A red one."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

Of course he did. He's told her five times in a voice she barely recognises as his.

Sometimes, Alex wonders if she's speaking to the Hal she knows at all or whether this is just a figment of Hal; a vestibule of his past shining through because there's so very little left of him.

"So, you were a soldier? Colonel Hal? Like Colonel Sanders only with blood instead of chicken, right? I always loved KFC…I _miss_ KFC…"

"Not a Colonel, no. I wasn't high-ranking. I never lived long enough to climb up to. But I fought well. I saved lives and I took them."

He looks stoic. Proud. It's hard to do with a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead from the impossible fever that's raging inside of him; with the lopsided hairstyle and the body that jerks against him at spasmodic intervals.

His chest puffs out as far as the straps will allow.

It'd be sweet if it wasn't so tragic.

"It was a brotherhood."

"A brotherhood? That's what my dad always used to say about our flat in Edinburgh. That it was a brotherhood. God knows what he thought of me. He probably thought I was gay or something 'cos of my laddish haircut. Shame, really."

"They weren't my _real _brothers, Alex. Not like yours."

"No, 'course not. That's a shame too."

There are a lot of 'shames' in Alex's life. That's just one of them. Her father always wanted to be a Grandad and he'll be pissing into the wind if he waits for the fruit of her siblings' crass loins.

Ah, life. For a moment she loses focus. She's thinking about Graham and his exams. Is he revising? Is he just messing around on the Xbox? She's thinking of Francis and his girlfriend. Is he treating her nicely? Will he buy her a box of tea-bags for Christmas without her input?

She's thinking too much and Hal is drifting. Tom told her not to let him do that.

He whimpers.

Oh…

His voice cracks as he begs in silence for whatever invisible force is assailing him to please, please leave him alone.

She can't listen any longer and when she hears her own voice she's surprised at how much poorly reigned in panic that is therein.

"SO, what got you into the army, Hal? Forgive me for saying it but...you don't look the jousting type."

He snaps awake again. He shakes the pain away. She heaves a sigh of invisible relief.

"I was a mercenary. It was that or hard labour. I wasn't even fighting for my own country."

Why fight for a country whose monarch left the likes of him to starve; to die on a brothel floor surrounded by his illiterate, diseased caretakers?

He'd have succumbed if he hadn't fought.

"Well in that case you should've fought for Scotland," Alex smiles "Braveheart and all that. We're loyal, us Scots. "

"I was loyal to no country. I was disloyal to anything but myself."

Such a confession makes him blush. Sigh.

The pride leaves him, leaving only the memory behind.

"But...once upon a time, I did have a shield."

Let him have that. Let him have that one thing.

"That's nice," Alex says, softly. "Maybe we could make you another one from paper mache and some glitter. Some Pritt Stick."

For the first time in awhile, Hal smiles. Really smiles.

"Annie would've liked that."

(*)

"So, other than this shield did you have anything else?"

It's funny to Alex, Hal's little quirk. The redness of the shield seems as important as the redness of the blood he's fighting so hard against.

"I had a sword too, and a bayonet. I had a huntsman's rifle. I shot at deer in the forests of Britain before I went to war."

"Where did you get the rifle?"

"I…I stole it."

Hal killed a lot of living things before he became a non-living thing. Alex, a spirit more than a mortal, can sense that. She can feel it in her bones that are no longer bones but shadows and air.

"I wasn't always a monster, Alex. And the killing I did back then was not just for the good of my own taste for blood. Please understand that."

Alex knows. She's heard. Countless times she's heard him decree himself as just a man; a sheep in wolf's clothing. He just wants acceptance. Cohesion. She humours Hal because it's easier that way. It's easier than seeing the confusion that passes across his pale, handsome face when she tells him she's heard this story before and he does not remember telling it. It's easier than seeing the embarrassment in his eyes when she likens his words to the repetitions of his obsessive compulsions.

_(You're like a broken record.)_

It's easier than hurting his fragile feelings by telling him to change the tune.

But, he can be so dramatic. So theatrical.

"Oh, Alex, I could've been something if only I'd cared. I could've been someone if only I'd mattered."

"Couldn't we all, Hal?"

"…I know. And I'm sorry. Alex, I truly am sorry."

His voice is high-strung, so different to the soft-chocolate that melted on his vocal chords when he was right in his own head. There's a scratchiness to it, a panic that hadn't been there before.

Alex finds it daunting. It's like listening to the shrieking string of a violin before it snaps.

(*)

"There were medals. I polished them every night before bed in order of merit."

"Always the most time spent on the highest honour," Alex says.

"That's right. I was a good soldier."

"One of the best. Enlisted at a young age."

"Yes. Sixteen."

"After you left the brothel."

There's a rhythm to this exchange that feels familiar. Comforting. Hal's tension relaxes as he falls into it.

It's becoming routine now.

"It was snowing when you left but the sky was clear during the battle."

"Yes. Yes, I left the brothel a few months before. When it was still cold."

"After your sixth mother died of consumption. Is that right?"

She tries to get it right, knows that he likes it. She's not mocking him. It proves she's been listening. All he has is his voice at present so it's important his voice is heard.

"Victoria."

"The youngest at twenty-nine."

"The nicest. The best."

"She loved you the most out of all of them. She called you her Little Lord Harry."

"A silly nickname."

"But, one which stuck."

The darkness that crosses his features doesn't scare her. Not when it fades to Little Boy Lost.

"She said I'd grow up to be King one day. I was named for one after all."

King of the World.

King of Murdering, Pillaging Underworld Scum.

"But, Catherine said I'd come to nothing."

Hal has stories for each of his mothers. He speaks of them at great length in his hours of delirium. Sometimes, Alex pulls a blanket over her dead form and listens in earnest as a son waxes lyrical about the women who raised him. He always speaks with the greatest fondness for Victoria, the least for Catherine who left him by a railway line when he was seven in the hopes he'd fall onto the tracks.

Victoria lasted the longest.

She loved him the most.

"What was your mother's name, Alex?"

Alex flinches at the past tense. Her mother is still alive. It is she that died.

"Edith," she replies. "Her name was...is...Edith. Brilliant name, eh? One step up from Edna, at least."

"It's a good name for a good woman."

"How would you know?"

Hal just smiles. It's more a grimace than anything. He smiles to hide his pain, a pain that sits and rests deep in his bones. There is no blood to regenerate him. There is only hunger.

He falls a little as the tiredness sits in.

Melancholy swallows him whole, suddenly,. It devours him as he might a morsel of flesh or a deep, bleeding wound.

"I'm a stain on my mothers' memories. All of them."

"Hal - "

"They'd be turning in their graves if they could see me now."

So would Alex's if she could see her darling daughter pandering to the needs of a mass murderer.

(*)

He sits in the chair by the window, his arms resting forcefully against the wood. In the moonlight he is motionless. He glows as a corpse might, bloodless and empty and devoid of life. But, Hal has a soul. Hal has a spirit. It's the only thing that's winning this battle.

"I used to play the lute."

Alex smiles. Annie warned her she'd never sleep but, with Tom out and with Hal succumbing to quiet for once, she'd found herself drifting off.

Her head jolts up.

His eyes implore her to listen. To engage.

"Is that right? You'll be cutting your own ear off next."

As with the others she's heard this story a thousand times already. She'll hear it a thousand more if it means he won't start lashing; he won't dislocate his shoulders to free himself like he did last week. It's healing, slowly, but there's still the threat of that grotesque lump of sinew and bone misshaping his shoulder blades.

He shifts. Safe, at least for now.

"It sang like a lark when I cultured it. I tried to teach Cutler how to be cultured but all he was interested in was Elvis Presley."

"Nothing wrong with that.. My brothers are into N-Dubs. I call winner on that one, laddie. You got to hear about The King. All I got to hear about was how Tulisa would get it and how Dappy should run the country."

"Cutler wore blue suede shoes with white dress pants."

That raises a smile.

"Figures."

She's stopped responding to Cutler's name now. It only causes more aggravation.; a depth of guilt that she fears Hal will not survive. She has learned over the years that the fragile male ego is something she is no contest for. She likens Hal's current condition to the hormonal angst of her youngest brother, Clive.

Cutler, it seems, is a trigger. The first few times she caused a fuss, threw back a sarcastic quip about sharing a toast of her blood over the lulling tones of 'some shitty fifties LP' but he'd seized so badly from the stress of it that she feared he'd choke.

She bites her own tongue now so that he doesn't bite through his own.

"Anyway, I';m partial to a bit of Elvis myself. The man's hips didn't lie."

"It is not a mistake to state that rock and roll is the devil's music of choice, Alex. It might well be that Lucifer has spread his wings and infected even further. To your...Tulisa, if you will."

"And, what would you prefer, Mr Old Time? You sound like my grandfather."

Only Hal Yorke is centuries past even her grandfather's father, and his father before.

She knows the answer. He thinks she hasn't heard him singing in his sleep, Gloria Gaynor to Marvin Gaye. The Four Tops to the Jackson Five.

She knows he'd be humiliated if she told him.

"Anything is preferable to noise, Alex. You young people today don't understand the beauty of music."

It's funny to hear those words coming from the face of a man who looks younger than she is.

(*)

He's been shaking for an hour now. Alex is at a loss with what to do. She's tried covering him with blankets but they stick to him like glue. She's tried warm tea, hot chocolate, the heating turned up full. She offered her body to try to get a rise out of him. She upped the innuendo just to make him snap. Come out of it.

What would your grandmother think, Alex?

Still, he shakes. Still, he quivers.

Talking doesn't help. He lost the ability to speak about ten minutes in. It feels redundant now. Alex is good at talking. She could talk for England, Ireland, Scotland AND Wales – but, all she wants now is for Tom to come back from work and let her forget about the world.

She watches Hal's internal conflict and it pains her. As his wrists bleed from the force of his struggles she finds her eyes glancing over the buckles that hold him down.

She's tempted.

When he starts vomiting blood and speaking in a language she cannot understand it's too much for her. She rushes to his side, bemoaning what she might have done had he dared stain her clothing, and moves to untie him.

The beast howls. Screams. Its eyes flash black, a warning sigh. It smiles.

It's not Hal. It's not sad, poignant Hal with his eyes the colour of hazelnuts and his lovely, choirboy smile.

"Go on, Casper", the voice that isn't Hal's growls. "I dare you. See what happens."

She gasps. As the blood drips down his chin and onto his chest she finds herself unable to look away.

Her hands still, just for a second.

"Hal?"

He returns to himself with a frail cough and pleads with her to leave him be.

Begs her not to unleash the monster from its cage.

"Don't let me out," he whispers. "Please. I don't trust myself. I won't be able to contain it."

"Okay," she whispers. She pulls her hands away as if burned. "Alright. Keep your trousers on. I'll keep up with the bondage if it'll make you happy."

"Happy..."

He sighs.

"Oh, Alex, it's been so long since I was happy."

"Yeah, well. Give it time, yeah? You've only been alive five hundred years."

Danger passed, his head lolls back. He stares at the ceiling as if he's looking for Heaven in the cracked artex plastering above.

He's quiet for five minutes. He's calm.

He looks like a battered child.

The child speaks.

"I've grown fond of our little talks, Alex. I don't know what I'd do without them."

They both know what he'd do without them.

Something changes in him in the throes of this battle. As the cavalry falls back and the enemy approaches, threatening and intimidating, something deep within him stirs and awakens. The man he was, perhaps. The boy who sought out his mothers touch when the world was crumbling around him.

He sighs, exhausted by it all. And, when she puts her hand to the side of his head to wipe away a tear of sweat that's falling down past his eyebrow, he leans into the touch. He seeks the warmth rather than repelling it.

He does not pull away.

"Really," he whispers, eyes closed, body limp, "I don't know what I'd do without you and Tom being here with me. Keeping him away. Keeping him at bay. Helping me to keep him quiet."

Him. The demon. The entity.

The darkness inside, differentiated, spoken as if it's not 'him' at all.

Of course he knows what he'd do.

He'd scream. Weep at the agony of being alive and dead once.

At the pressure of having been born and sired at all.

(TBC...)


End file.
